The invention relates to voice-activation technology, and particularly to means for interpreting spoken commands by demarking time intervals with and without voiced sound.
Voice-activation is an exciting, emerging technology. Unfortunately, the current art in speech recognition offers little support for single-purpose devices. A wide range of potential applications, particularly in test and measurement instrumentation, require only two or three specific operations under voice control. Currently such devices have no economic path to commercialization because full speech recognition is far too expensive and cumbersome. Many voice-activated systems require a link to remote supercomputers, further increasing the cost and complexity.
Another problem with current voice-activation technology is its slow response time. Many special-purpose applications require a very fast response, especially when the response triggers a measurement. For example, a voice-activated pulse generator that triggers an oscilloscope would require a near-instantaneous command response so that the user can capture a transient event. Current speech recognition routines cannot provide a quick trigger because of the time needed to perform the speech recognition.
Another big problem is command interpretation error. Prior systems are notoriously error-prone. Systems dependent on speech recognition software often confuse one command for another, or interpret a background noise for a command. Even after a tedious “training” process, current speech recognition systems routinely misinterpret commands, or miss them completely, for no apparent reason. Moreover, speech recognition systems are necessarily speaker-dependent and are susceptible to complex backgrounds such as those often found in office and laboratory environments.
What is needed is a way to recognize just two or three simple commands, economically and without annoyance, and generate a fast responsive action according to the command. Preferably the new technology would include versatile noise-rejection strategies, robust instantaneous command-recognition steps, and true speaker universality regardless of intonation or accent or language—and without “training”. The new technology would enable voice control over many useful specific-function devices, while avoiding the expense and complexity of speech recognition software or expensive links to remote supercomputers. Such a technology would enable voice-activated counting, interval timing, pulse generation, voltage measurement, size and distance measurement, weighing, and a host of other test and control devices that are not economically or technically feasible with current technology.